


these fragments I have shored against my ruins

by delhuillier



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: M/M, Silent Hill 3-style demon baby pregnancy, i.e. mpreg, just...FYI, yet another title ripped from The Waste Land
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 13:55:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14403537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delhuillier/pseuds/delhuillier
Summary: Henry should have died the night the Risen overran the capital. Instead, Grima saved his life and took him home.Yeah, Henry doesn't get it, either.





	1. Dieu riche en miséricorde

Henry’s dying. It’s not as fun as he thought it would be.

Death doesn’t scare him in the slightest, of course. Everyone croaks, eventually, and who knows? It might be fun.

But gods, getting there is the problem. There’s pain—from broken bones, from the teeth of a knife, from the prick of a needle—and then there’s _pain_. Pain from having your stomach opened by a Risen’s rusty blade. The kind of pain that makes it hard to walk or do much of anything at all except sit against a wall and try to hold your guts in while the world blurs in your fading vision like a smeared watercolour painting.

Distantly, Henry realises he’s hearing footsteps. He lifts his head to see who it is—or gives it a try, at least. His head lolls as his strength quickly wanes.

Robin comes around the corner. No, wait, Henry thinks, thoughts flowing sluggishly through a skull that feels stuffed with cotton. That’s not Robin anymore. The Robin he knows would not be covered in so much blood. At least, he wouldn’t look so at peace with that fact, because the Robin he knew always hated dealing death—even when it was absolutely necessary, even though he was so, so good at it.

(Henry remembers the little crease between Robin’s brows when Robin had surveyed the battlefield after their taking of Fort Steiger. The many, many dead. The keening wails of horses unlucky enough to be still living despite shattered limbs or opened bellies.

“Don’t look so dour,” Henry said. He planted a finger between Robin’s brows, right where his brow furrowed. “We won, didn’t we? ‘Kill our foes or be killed ourselves’, right?”

Robin sighed, frustration plain in his fine features, and brushed Henry’s hand aside. “Yes. I guess I did say that.”

“Exactly,” Henry said. “Besides, we didn’t lose anyone on our side, so that’s something to be happy about. Yeah? You’re always telling me about how important it is to keep everyone alive...”

Finally, Robin smiled. A little. It wasn’t the greatest smile in the world, but it sure suited him better than the frown he was wearing before. “I suppose that’s good. ...Thank you, Henry.”)

“Ah,” Grima says. “Here you are. The Plegian boy.”

He looks Henry up and down like he’s a piece of meat set out on a butcher’s counter. A smile emerges on his face: more angular than the ones Robin would wear. Hungrier. A slash cut across flawless skin. “Yes, I think you’ll do,” the Fell Dragon says. He turns his head to call back down the corridor. “Chrom! To me.”

And Chrom comes to his side—living, breathing, Chrom, who won’t look at Henry. Hale and hearty Chrom. Not corrupted like the others who have died at Grima’s hands, but allowed to exist as something other than a shambling corpse. Henry thinks blearily: missed opportunity. What would the Exalt look like, turned into a Risen? Now he’ll never know.

Grima hunkers down in front of him. Henry’s eyes slide back to him. “I’m afraid I can’t let you die,” he tells Henry. “So let’s get you fixed up, shall we?”

He reaches out.

There’s pain—from splinters, from scrapes, from bruises—and then there’s _pain_ , from someone rooting around in your insides while you scream, and scream, and scream.

=

When Henry regains consciousness, he’s in bed, with silken sheets that smell like soap and lemon water pulled up to his chin. He stares up at the ceiling, the elaborate white-painted boiseries, the minutely-carved historical figures dancing across the wooden panels, and realises he must be in the palace at Ylisstol.

He can barely summon the effort to sit up, and when he does, nausea sweeps through him, vertiginous and debilitating. His body feels wrong: as though he had been taken apart, his skin stripped from his muscles, muscles unwound from bones, bones scraped clean of marrow, and put back together again in not quite the right way. It’s a feeling of violation that he can’t shake.

Once the nausea recedes, Henry lifts his shirt and in the sunlight coming through the wide windows, prods experimentally at his stomach. Pale and smooth and soft, like usual—there’s not even a scar. He whistles softly. Grima does _good_ work for someone with such a penchant for destruction.

A low chuckle, off to his left.

It’s the dragon himself, sitting in a chair with his legs crossed at the knee. He looks just like Robin, except for the eyes, which are as red as freshly-spilled blood. Eyes are the window to the soul, right?

Henry grins, and tells Grima so.

“I suppose in this case that cliché rings rather more true than usual, doesn’t it?” Grima says. “I see you must be feeling better.”

“Aw, not really,” Henry says. “I mean, my guts are all back where they should be, which is great. Thanks for that, by the way.”

Grima smiles faintly: a condescendingly amused expression that Robin would never have worn. It’s surprisingly attractive.

It occurs to Henry, in an abstract sort of way, that he should probably be feeling some sort of terror right about now. The dragon stole Robin’s body and murdered Robin’s friends, one after the other, and has consigned the entire world to the blight of the Risen. Henry _was_ going to go the same way as his comrades—yet Grima had healed him and brought him here.

It’s all so very intriguing. It conjures the same feeling Henry gets when he’s investigating the Risen and what makes them tick: a buzzing surge of energy that seethes underneath his skin, makes his fingers itch to get their hands on something he can pull apart. He wants to cut Grima open. Peel apart the skin of his chest. Crack open his ribs. Nose around in the warmth and the blood. Where did the dragon’s soul anchor itself within the human body? How closely are man and dragon linked? He wants to _know._

Robin’s gone, after all. He won’t mind.

The dragon’s smile grows keener and Henry, grinning still, is suddenly sure Grima can tell what he’s thinking. It gives him goosebumps, makes him shiver with the same heady feeling you get when caught red-handed doing something naughty.

“You’ll be staying here for the time being, boy,” Grima says, getting up from his chair. “I advise you not to test me if you wish to remain alive. Otherwise, the palace is yours to use as you see fit.”

“Why didn’t you kill me?” Henry blurts out, before he can stop himself. “I don’t get you. Don’t you want all humans dead? Seems pretty inconsistent to _me_.”

All Grima offers in return on his way to the door is an enigmatic smile. 

He pauses in front of the door, hand on the knob, and then half-turns back towards Henry, as though he’s just remembered something. 

“One more thing,” Grima says. “The Risen in the palace are docile creatures. Use them any way you’d like.”

He leaves, and Henry falls back onto the bed, the shivery feeling from before still crawling under his skin like a swarm of insects. Grima has shown him mercy—for now. And it doesn’t make any sense at all.

=

True to Grima’s word, once he’s recovered, Henry is allowed to roam the palace at his leisure. He pokes his head into rooms once used by nobles, finding sometimes only unused furniture and abandoned clothing, finding other times corpses bloating as they decay. He goes to the dining room every so often, if only to trace out with one slender finger patterns and half-formed runes in the thick layer of dust lying on the long oaken table.

He sees Risen, sometimes. They wander the halls just as he does, eyes glowing like banked embers. Often, they’ll stop and watch him when he passes by, their heads moving slowly to track him until he moves out of sight. Quiet as the grave, Henry thinks, and he grins.

Grima still won’t tell him why he’s brought Henry back to the palace. In fact, Grima seems to have forgotten he’s there—Henry rarely sees him, and when he does, the dragon’s always in the company of Chrom: walking by his side, sharing a meal with him, riding him with his head thrown back and eyes closed and lips slightly parted, as though he’s in the middle of prayer.

Neither of them seem to care that Henry’s around. 

There’s something between the two of them, Grima and Chrom, that Henry doesn’t understand. Chrom is no Risen, is not subordinate to the Fell Dragon in any way Henry can see, and yet the Falchion sits in its sheath, unused. Instead of killing Grima, Chrom fucks him: bends him over a table in the library, lays with him on a bed in a bedroom, any bedroom, takes him on his hands and knees like an animal in the grass of the inner courtyard. It’s true that Chrom and Robin were lovers, but Grima _isn’t_ Robin.

“Maybe Chrom can’t see that,” Henry muses to the Risen he’s decided to crack open like a particularly stubborn nut. “Or maybe he can, and doesn’t care? What a sicko.”

He brandishes a knife he stole from the kitchen and, following the diagrams in a book on medicine he has open beside him, carves open the Risen’s chest _here_ and _here_ , and pins back the flaps of dead skin with hatpins stolen from closets whose owners are long gone. The Risen offers no resistance whatsoever; it doesn’t even make a sound. Just lies quietly there on the floor like something dead.

Henry snickers to himself, and then says: “Nothing to say? You know, it’s rude to ignore someone.”

The bone saw, also pilfered from the kitchen’s stores, comes next. One rib gives way, then another. Henry carefully lines up the neatly-cut pieces of bone by the Risen’s body to save for later. With all the time he has now and nothing to do, what better time to try out new magic?

Once he’s finished opening a window into the Risen’s chest, Henry puts the bone saw aside and pushes up his sleeves. “All right, my friend,” he says, plunging his hands into the Risen’s guts and readying his magic, “time to give up your secrets.”

Half an hour later, all Henry has are hands stained with gritty, ashen blood, and a mess on the carpet he’s thankful he won’t have to clean up. End of the world, and all.

He sits back, wiping his hands carelessly on his shirt, and then starts when he feels a hand on his shoulder.

“Amusing yourself?”

Grima leans down. He smells like sex and sweat, and through the open neck of his tunic, Henry sees bruises: the shape of hands, pressed into Grima’s throat, a butterfly of purple and black. Teeth marks, glistening with fresh scabs, march along his collarbone and down his chest.

Henry grins. “Nope! Not really.” He pokes at the Risen; it gurgles wetly and tries and fails to move a head on a flayed neck. “Can’t seem to figure out how these puppies work.”

“Ah.”

Words keep coming. That feeling is under Henry’s skin again, pricking at his insides, making his heart thud in his narrow chest. He realises that what he’s feeling just might be fear, mixed with some kind of dark excitement. “You make ‘em, right? Got any insights to share? See, I can _summon_ them, but I’ve never known what drives them, you know?”

“My. That is a problem.”

Grima moves towards the head of the Risen and hunkers down there. “Come closer, boy. Let me show you something.”

Henry obeys. Grima digs his nails under the mask sewn into the Risen’s face, and pulls it up, bringing with it broken threads, torn hunks of skin, and a strange skein of organic tendrils that twitch and pulse, like veins or muscles, bound to the underside of the mask. He plucks something from the inside of the mask, and holds it up for Henry’s inspection.

It’s a shelled insect, about the size of Henry’s thumb. “Thanatophage,” Grima says, by way of explanation. He puts the mask aside and drags the edge of a nail down the tendrils that link the thanatophage pinched between his fingers and the Risen’s body, down to the point where they disappear under the Risen’s skin, and Henry watches, fascinated, as the Risen’s fingers clench when the tendrils contract in response to the perceived threat.

“They were the byproduct of an experiment to create life,” Grima says. “When placed on a corpse, they put down roots and animate it in order to search for nutrition. Embedding them in the underside of the mask allows you to command and direct them, as the man who created them once did.”

Grima smiles thinly. “One experiment he never got around to performing was the placement of a death mask on a living human being.” He chuckles, taking up the mask with tips of his fingers. “I wonder.”

And Henry is convinced at that moment that Grima’s going to lean in and place the mask over his face (he can see it in his head as clearly as he sees Grima before him now, can feel Grima’s free hand curl around the back of his neck and feel the heat of his breath as he leans in to press the mask down), but he’s not sure if the squirming feeling in his chest is terror or anticipation. It makes his body hum and crackle, though, makes his head and the tips of his fingers feel warm.

But instead Grima simply passes him the mask and straightens up, as though he’s suddenly lost interest in indulging Henry’s curiosity. He inclines his head in Henry’s direction and departs without another word.

Henry lets out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Something like relief, but disappointment, too, washes through him, and he relaxes, his back thudding against the wall—real and here and not part of the images swirling in the back of his mind.

He holds the mask up to the light, watches the segmented legs of the thanatophages embedded in it kick uselessly at the air, and wonders how much it would hurt if he put it on. (Wonders how much it would hurt to be bitten with Grima’s sharp, sharp teeth, how it would feel to have those nails rake his back and dig into his hips.)

Grima could hurt him so, so easily, and Henry wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. So why hasn’t he? What does he _want_?

=

A day later, for the first time since his arrival at the palace, Henry finds Chrom alone. It’s just past noon and he’s made his way down to the kitchen to find something to eat—he’s not sure where Grima is getting all the food, but he isn’t complaining—and Chrom’s there, cutting vegetables. The smell of beef stew simmering on the stove, heavy with spices, hangs thick and warm in the air.

He hadn’t known Chrom well, back when he was a part of the Shepherds. He’d known him as an outline sketched by general facts: Chrom is trusting and kind and idealistic. Chrom is handsome and strong and sometimes breaks training dummies. Chrom is the Exalt (ensure you respect him as such, Frederick said). Nothing about the Exalt had interested him, really—so boring and bland and conventional.

Now, though, Henry’s seeing another side of him. A Chrom who’s willingly subjugated himself to the Fell Dragon, Grima. A Chrom bound by something twisted and creeping and dark to the dragon who wears the face of his lover. He doesn’t get it, but perhaps soon he will.

When he comes through the doorway, Chrom looks up and offers him a small nod. Nothing else, not even a hello.

“I didn’t know the _Exalt_ could cook,” Henry says abruptly, crashing into the conversation with all his usual tact. “I thought you had servants for that?”

Chrom winces, but says nothing.

“Maybe we could get the Risen to do it. I mean, we’ve got so many. You could sit back, drink wine, give ‘em a good flogging if they mess up...well, that wouldn’t work because they don’t feel pain, but it’s the thought that counts, right?”

Again, Chrom says nothing. Henry looks over, and sees none of the good-natured commander that had led the Shepherds before. Just someone brought low by their own exhaustion: slumped shoulders, dark circles lurking under blue-grey eyes, a dulled gaze.

“So,” Henry says, “did I do something, Your Grace? Do you just not want to talk to me because you feel guilty, or something? Well, you shouldn’t. I really don’t mind being here. It’s pretty cushy, all things considered—”

Chrom lays his knife aside, turns to face Henry. Henry finds himself grinning again, his whole body tensing as he waits for the moment when Chrom’s fist collides with his face (like back at the academy, when everything he did, even if everything was nothing, won him punches and kicks and canings and nights trapped in a box too small to sit down in).

But Chrom doesn’t touch him. Instead, he undoes the collar of his shirt, opening it for Henry’s inspection.

“Oh!” Henry says. He giggles. It comes out more nervous than amused. “He got you good, didn’t he?”

An ugly patch of thick scar tissue spreads out across the front of Chrom’s neck, as though someone had taken their clawed hand and ripped out his throat. No wonder he’s got nothing to say.

“At least he let you keep the scar,” Henry says, after a second or two. Another giggle bubbles from between his lips. “He got rid of mine, unfortunately. I’m sure it would have looked great.”

He hoists himself onto an unused counter, swings his feet like a child. “I’ve got some great curses that can help with that,” he says, as Chrom returns to dicing carrots and onions for the stew. “The whole not-speaking thing, I mean. There’s one in my repertoire that lets everyone around you hear every single one of your thoughts, no matter how trivial. Though I guess that doesn’t really count as talking. And it might be a _little_ inconvenient.

“Or maybe,” Henry continues, as a thought strikes him, “we could cobble you together a new voice from Risen parts? It wouldn’t be hard. They don’t care _what_ you do to them. And think about it: a new voice, for every occasion…”

He trails off, because Chrom’s ruffling his hair. He gives Henry a small half-smile, and then shakes his head.

“Is that a no?” Henry says. The back of his neck prickles strangely, as though a shower of sparks is pouring across his skin, and he can still feel Chrom’s hand in his hair. “Aw, come on. It’d be a great experiment. It might hurt a little. A lot. But he’ll patch us up if anything goes wrong, won’t he?”

In response, Chrom hands him a peeler and some potatoes washed clean of dirt.

“I don’t know how to peel potatoes,” Henry informs him helpfully. But he takes them anyway, because it’s clear to him, at least, that it’s not a request for help but an invitation to stay.

Chrom shrugs: _You’ll figure it out._

Henry does. He sits there in the kitchen with Chrom and helps him make stew; peels what Chrom indicates he should peel, cuts and slices what Chrom indicates he should cut and slice (he’s better at that than peeling—he’s good with knives). He talks to Chrom, too, jumping from topic to topic, from the Risen inside the palace ( _why are they so calm?_ ) to the thanatophages and back to the Risen ( _I wonder how much it would take for one to attack me..._ ) again, but never quite touching on what Chrom is doing here.

It’s—something. A moment of commiseration shared between two prisoners, perhaps. Except they don’t do much commiserating because Chrom is mute, and with the world as it is outside the palace, overrun by Risen, is there even much to commiserate about in the first place?

Well. Even if Henry doesn’t know what to call it, it’s still something. Something that leaves him warm and relaxed, empties him of the jittery energy that had filled him the last few days. It’s nice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The thanatophages are, by the way, canon. Go play the SoV postgame if you don't believe me. Alternatively, [ see here for a translation of an SoV lore book.](https://kantopia.wordpress.com/2018/04/07/fe-sov-valentia-accordion-secrets-of-thabes-labyrinth-translated/)


	2. Point de bascule

He starts to learn the times Chrom will be in the kitchen alone, preparing food for himself and Grima and Henry, and starts to show up during those times more often, acting as though it’s just coincidence. Chrom can’t talk, it’s true, but he’s another living being that can think and act and maybe Henry, who has only had the Risen for company so far, has been a little lonely. Maybe he has missed, too, the conversations by the fire and the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners the Shepherds enjoyed together. He’s not often much help, it’s true, but Chrom doesn’t seem to mind. And, well, Chrom can’t really complain, either.

(Sometimes, when Henry remembers that the Shepherds are all dead, he curls in on himself, squeezing his knees to his chest, a movement as unconscious as someone flinching away from the thing that causes them pain, and tries to ignore the feeling building inside him. Like someone’s torn a gaping hole in his chest.)

Besides, Chrom’s handsome enough. Henry likes to watch his hands while he works. Likes to imagine what they feel like—holding his hips, wrapped around his wrist, locked around his throat, always tight enough to bruise. In his head, Chrom treats him like Chrom treats Grima (and Grima treats him like Grima treats Chrom). Henry’s fantasised about other men before, and pain always colours the pictures that move through his mind—whether it’s Lon’qu biting his shoulder or Ricken yanking his hair as Henry sucks him off or Robin himself clawing bloody furrows into his back as Henry shoves his cock into him.

There’s not much he can do other than watch Chrom, anyway, because Chrom can’t hold a conversation to save his life.

As for Grima, he’s there even when he isn’t, looming over the both of them, a spreading stain that touches every aspect of their strange new lives. His presence is inscribed on Chrom’s flesh in scratches and bites and deep-blue bruises, in the skin of Chrom’s wrists rubbed raw by rope, in split lips and a swollen-shut eye.

Chrom, naturally, is uncomplaining. He submits to Grima and he submits to Henry, too, when Henry asks to see the injuries. He pushes his unkempt hair out of his face so Henry can get a better look at his eye and rolls up his sleeves so Henry can soothe the abraded skin there with a curse. He almost always has new wounds whenever they see each other, and Henry almost always tends to them—sometimes clumsily, sometimes not.

It’s nothing special, of course. Henry has a particular interest in the many ways the human body can be tested without breaking under the strain, and it gives him an opportunity to hone his magic. It’s a routine, almost.

He’s nearly settled into it when Grima deigns to come to him again, appearing in the wing of the palace Henry has taken as his own stomping ground. Henry finds him leaning against a wall, arms folded, looking out a window with a pensive expression on his face. It could be coincidence, but Henry knows, he _knows_ , that it isn’t.

For a second—a second only, as fleeting as dew under the morning sun—Henry considers fleeing. He even takes a quiet step back. Grima is focussed on what he sees beyond the glass panes, after all, so maybe, just maybe he hasn’t noticed him yet—

Grima turns his head, pinning Henry to the spot with the weight of his crimson gaze. “Ah, boy,” he says. “Come here.”

Henry obeys. He always does, no matter who’s ordering him around. First it was Gangrel, then it was Robin, and now it’s Robin again, from a certain point of view. Funny how that works out.

“Look,” Grima says.

Henry looks.

In the inner courtyard below, Chrom is doing sword drills. His shirt is off because of the summer heat, and Henry notes in detail the beginnings of a sunburn on the back of Chrom’s neck, Chrom’s broad, muscled back, his skin, slick with sweat.

There are scars, too.

There are so, so many of them. The violence written in their knotted, twisted lines makes Henry’s head spin.

“What’s he training for?”

Grima raises an eyebrow.

“There’s nothing to kill but the Risen, y’know?” Henry says. “And they just stand around, so that’s not exciting at all.” He looks at Grima, then back at Chrom, the motion jerky and quick, like a startled bird. “Why haven’t you gotten rid of him, anyway?” he asks suddenly, as Chrom turns, exposing a chest equally as scarred as his back.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s the Exalt,” Henry says. He mimes getting stabbed in the gut. “He could get you at any time. Send you back to sleep, or whatever.”

“Not without the Awakening, he won’t,” Grima says. His smile burns in the corner of Henry’s vision like a creeping flame. “And he wouldn’t do so even if he had that power. Not after what I did.”

“What’d you do, hurt him? I mean, wow, look at those scars.”

Grima chuckles. His right hand settles on the small of Henry’s back as he says, “No, though most of those _are_ from me. But they came later.”

His voice drops low, becomes conspiratorial, almost, and Henry finds he can’t move. Can’t even twitch a finger. He’s all frozen up, even though his heart is thudding frantically in his chest, like it’s trying to burrow out through his ribs.

“I killed the people that were dearest to him,” Grima says, “and I made him watch. Lissa. Maribelle. Frederick. You liked Frederick, too, didn’t you? You’ll be glad to know he died nobly. Lady Lissa cried. Maribelle spat in my face.” He laughs. “She came to regret that.”

Grima joins Henry in watching Chrom. “Once that was done, once his sister and her dearest friend and his most loyal servant succumbed, I took our child, Lucina—we used a surrogate, you know, a kind village lady—and broke her head open on the stone at his feet.

“So no, he won’t hurt me.” Grima’s smile turns crooked. “Not in any significant way, at least. Because humans break easily, and I have broken him. Now, I am all he has left of the life he once knew, and he clings to me.”

Henry’s grinning again, so wide his cheeks hurt. As Grima moves to hold Henry more securely in the curve of his right arm, his fingers digging into Henry’s hip, Grima reaches up with his other hand and lays it flat on Henry’s cheek, turning Henry’s face towards him. His hands are unexpectedly warm, unexpectedly human and terrifyingly gentle, the gentleness of becalmed waters that could, at any moment, rise up as devouring waves.

“As for why,” Grima says softly, face a mere inch apart from Henry’s, “you know the feeling. I’m sure you do. A yearning to make unclean what is clean and to defile what is sacred. And the knowledge that even though Chrom is not a Risen, he has submitted himself to me… To humans, I have always been seen as nothing more than corruption, than something to be feared and condemned. _So be it._ ”

Henry shudders. He wants Grima to hurt him, he realises, to _at last_ pop this bubble of tension that has enveloped him these past few days. He has been waiting on tenterhooks for Grima to do _something_ to him and gods, he doesn’t want to wait any longer.

It’s humbling to realise: Grima is undoing him by not doing a single, solitary thing. Let him pull Henry’s eyes from their sockets, let him lever Henry’s fingernails from their beds, let him rip Henry open and pull up his ribcage to get at his heart. At least then, Henry would finally be released from this hellish purgatory.

“But though Chrom is, no doubt, pleasing to your eye,” Grima says, “he isn’t exactly what I had in mind.” He grasps Henry’s chin and turns Henry’s gaze up, directing it out over the palace’s outer walls and the forest beyond. “Look further.”

Henry squints and looks and finally sees what Grima means: a slender finger of smoke, no doubt from a cookfire, stark against the barren blue of the summer sky. “Survivors?” Henry says, his voice coming out squeaky and shaky. “It’s a miracle! ...Unless you _let_ them live? Just for kicks? A give-them-false-hope sort of thing?”

“No, not at all,” Grima says. “They’ve survived under their own power. Impressive, no?” He combs his hand through Henry’s hair. “A woman counts herself amongst their number. I’d like you to bring her to me. Alive. Do whatever you want with the rest.”

“You’re not afraid of me running away?” Henry asks.

“Feel free to try. Most of Plegia was Grimleal, and so most of Plegia took part in the effort to breed me a new vessel. Thus does my fell blood flow thick and strong in your veins—perhaps in another world, it is you, Henry, that I am inside. I will always be able to find you and bring you back again, because the blood that moves within you sings to me.” 

Grima nudges Henry back, further and further, until Henry’s pressed back up against a wall, and shoves his knee between Henry’s legs, up against his crotch. He leans close, sweetly kisses the corner of Henry’s lips, and then murmurs into his ear:

“So run, if you like. But know that you cannot escape me.”

He smiles, and then withdraws, letting Henry sag on unsteady legs, harder than he’s probably ever been before. When Henry recovers enough to come back to himself, Grima is gone, a shadow whose source has stepped out of the light.

Henry surrenders, and drops on the floor with a thud. He gropes for his cock, remembering the way Grima had held him, _dominating_ him with so little effort. Luxuriating, so obscenely, in his mastery over Henry.

Grima had been so, so close to doing something _more_. He could have taken Henry up against the wall; could have torn away his clothes, could have abused him like he abused Chrom. Could have torn into his skin with his nails, could have given him scars. But he hadn’t. So Henry has to make do.

Chrom flashes across his mind, too, as Henry ushers himself to completion with frantic pumps of his hand: Chrom stroking him with his hands, large and callused and warm, until he comes, and then cradling him against his chest as Henry takes his cock up to the hilt. It’s that image that lingers in his mind after he’s finished, and it’s that image that hovers there as Henry leaves the palace, headed north, towards the group of survivors.

=

The Risen know him, when he’s outside the palace. They congregate around him, and trail after him, dumbly loyal to one of their master’s favoured. They keep watch when Henry needs to sleep or eat, standing still and silent a few feet away from him; they press closer to him, protectively, when unfamiliar sounds come from bushes.

And the Risen, they kill every one of the survivors, except for the woman, after the little group tries to attack Henry; and _she_ lives only because he kills the Risen before they get to her. All that remains afterwards are corpses, some still twitching as the thanatophages in the death masks struggle to move their hosts before they die.

He doesn’t remember much after that. Doesn’t remember making it back to the castle, or how he got the woman there. He remembers only the blood (on his lips on his face on his hands on his clothes), and the words the woman screams at him, echoing over and over again inside the osseous cradle of his skull. _Monster. Inhuman creature. Monster._

(The villagers thought the same. Even though it was them who killed his friend, shot her full of arrows, spilled her blood across the snow and _oh_ —he had his revenge, he did, but none of the killing brought her back.)

It’s too bad Grima wants her. Henry’s sure she’d die beautifully.

Grima is waiting for him in the entrance hall, Chrom by his side. “Good boy,” he says, when Henry staggers in through the front doors.

Grima gestures languidly, and the shadows in the back of the entrance hall disgorge Risen, who take up the crying woman in their cold hands. “Well done,” is all he tells Henry, before following the Risen back into the depths of the palace.

When the sound of the woman’s sobs finally fades, Chrom steps towards him. Henry’s head whips up.

“Chrom,” he says. His voice is too loud. “Buddy. Pal. How’s it going? Sorry I had to step out for a while. Had to run a little errand.”

Chrom’s hands settle on Henry’s shoulders. Worry is obvious in the set of Chrom’s jaw and in the crease between his brows.

“Robin would be _so_ mad at me,” Henry tells him. “You know he told me not to kill innocents?” He laughs unevenly, an ugly staccato sound, a smile flickering on his face like a guttering candle. He’s shaking. “But that’s what I just did! Well, it wasn’t _my_ fault, technically. Or, I guess it was? I did sort of set the Risen on them. I didn’t _mean_ to, though. I promise.”

He’s itching with energy, like someone’s hit him with a Thunder spell; he can barely breathe because of it, as though iron bands have been clamped around his chest and have started to tighten. He remembers blood, an outflung arm, a chest cracked open and emptied of its contents like a looted box of jewellery. He could do a similar violence to Chrom, right here, right now. All it would take is a little magic, a little creativity.

Grima might like it. Grima’s like him.

Hands—large and callused and warm—cup his cheeks, and Henry starts, his mind quieting all at once. His breathing still comes quick and shallow and he still feels like his ribs are about to crack from the bands wrapped tight around his chest, but the chaos in his mind, the thudding white noise that sometimes overtakes his thoughts, has receded. For the moment.

“Oh, gods,” Henry says, clapping his hands over Chrom’s, “I’m a mess!”

He laughs again, delighted by the idea. Then he pushes himself up onto his tiptoes and throws his arms around Chrom’s neck and crushes their lips together.

It’s less a kiss and more of an assault, and it makes Henry’s inexperience obvious. Chrom yields to his fumbling affections, taking it all in stride, even when Henry draws blood by sinking his teeth into Chrom’s lower lip.

“Please,” Henry says, when Chrom gently breaks the two of them apart. “ _Do_ something. Mess me up more, Chrom. Oh, gods, _please._ I—I need—”

What does he need? He doesn’t know. He’s never really known. He’s tried to fill the need with killing, with inflicting and receiving pain, but that hasn’t worked (and probably would never). So maybe—

Chrom shakes his head, and a shaky laugh dribbles from Henry’s lips. “You’re just as bad as he is,” Henry moans. He eyes Chrom, and then continues: “You and Grima, you’re both the same. You’re _killing_ me. And, unfortunately, I don’t mean that literally.”

He’s sure Chrom’s going to hit him this time—the _look_ on his face—but Chrom doesn’t. Instead he guides Henry back to his room, sits him down by the bath in the en suite bathroom, and turns on the water. Whatever magic the court mages had imbued the palace’s innards with still works, and the water comes out blisteringly hot.

When the bath is ready, Chrom helps Henry out of his bloodied clothes (his gaze settles for a moment on the thin little scars on Henry’s arms, but he doesn’t stare. Henry’s surprised. Most people do). Bundling them under one arm, he gestures meaningfully at the water.

“All right, all right,” Henry says. He slides into the water with a hiss; it’s too hot, but he doesn’t mind. Once in the tub, Henry ducks his head into the heat, submerging himself totally. The water weighs heavily on his closed eyelids; he feels the pressure on his chest at last start to ease.

He surfaces to find Chrom has left him. With a sigh, he props his slender body on the edge of the tub and watches water drip, drip, drip from the tips of his fingers to puddle on the tile floor.

He hadn’t realised how tired he truly was until just this moment. It makes sense: he hadn’t really stopped at all on his way back, had he, pursued without rest by the memories of a village he thought he had left dead and buried. Now he feels ready to doze off right here, cosseted by warmth.

But Chrom’s return stops him from slipping away. “Aw,” Henry smiles, as Chrom edges his way through the door, carrying fresh clothes, towels, and a tray of food, “how sweet of you. You shouldn’t have.”

Chrom comes to a halt in the middle of the bathroom, and Henry sees an echo of Chrom’s old awkwardness in how he can’t seem to decide what to put down first or where. Eventually, the food is given a place on the sink counter, and the towel and clothes are relegated to the floor. When that’s done, Chrom nods in Henry’s direction, and turns to leave.

“Hey,” Henry says, before Chrom can leave. “Sorry for,” he pauses for a second, “you know, what I said.” He trails his fingers through water turned pinkish from the blood that had seeped through his clothes to lay its hands on his skin. “You’re not like Grima at all.”

Chrom gestures dismissively, but Henry keeps talking. “Sometimes, I get...sometimes, I just can’t really...calm down.” He lets himself drop back into the water, and stares up at the ceiling, hair spreading out in the water to form a pale halo around his head. “It’s crazy weird. I start feeling like I’m overflowing. Like I’m going to explode if I don’t find some way to let it all out. See, that’s why I like fighting and killing, because it makes it better, kind of. It grounds some of that energy, y’know. But Grima makes it worse. A lot worse. Around him, I—” Henry cuts himself off with a laugh that rings falsely even in his ears. “He’s one scary guy!”

While Henry spoke, Chrom had come further back into the room, and now he leans against the doorway, arms folded. Listening. It’s a rare experience—not many of the people he’d befriended in the Shepherds had ever tried to _listen_ to him before, except for maybe Ricken, and Cherche, the one person he’d told about the wolf he’d had as a companion when young, and Robin. The others had asked him for things, they’d tried to put words in his mouth, but they hadn’t listened. Not really.

“What I meant what I said that you’re not like Grima,” Henry says, “is that I don’t feel as...frenetic around you. I feel calm. Calmer,” he amends, blushing openly, but uncaringly, as he remembers the kiss from before. “So, uh...there you have it.”

He gives Chrom a smile, wide and unconstrained. It’s an actual smile, for once, not one of his rictus grins.

Chrom smiles back. Warm and sympathetic and halfway fond, it’s rusty from disuse but nevertheless tells Henry he had been right to finally give some of himself to Chrom. Though he has no doubt that in another life they would move in completely separate orbits, knowing only each other’s face and name, now they are victims of circumstance, linked by proximity alone.

They are prisoners both, after all, but at least they are prisoners together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Henry is such a bitch to write.


	3. La petite mort

The next morning comes too soon. Henry, as usual, is awake and alert almost immediately after being roused by the prodding of fingers of sunlight creeping through the bedroom’s open windows. He sits up, pushes back the sleeves of the too-large shirt Chrom had given him the night before, and rubs one eye, then the other, as he takes in the room.

Everything’s in its usual place, save for one thing: Chrom is there, asleep in the chair he’d set next to the bed last night so he could stay close. Henry smiles a little at the memory—it had been honestly endearing that Chrom had been so intent on remaining with him after what Henry had said. So intent indeed that he had dozed off by Henry’s side, hunching over the bed so he could rest his head on his arms.

On impulse, Henry rests his hand lightly on Chrom’s head. The Exalt really is selfless, he muses. Robin would always talk about how Chrom worked so hard for the army (Robin talked a lot about Chrom back then, reasonably enough, and his face would always relax when he did so, the lines of worry vanishing as he spoke about the love of his life), often at great cost to himself, but Henry hadn’t really taken him seriously. Silly lover’s talk, that’s all it had been to him at the time.

But to think that Chrom’s first instinct, upon hearing that Henry felt better, sometimes, when he was around him, was to stay close by for the rest of the night, that’s…

A hand grasps his wrist, and Henry realises, not without some surprise, that Chrom’s eyes are open and watching him. How long had he been awake?

“Morning, sunshine,” Henry says, leaving his hand right where it is. He dares to muss Chrom’s hair. “Sleep well?”

Chrom rolls his eyes. He sits back, moving Henry’s hand off him as he does so, and then lets Henry go. With a grimace, Chrom rolls his shoulders and massages the back of his neck, clearly regretting the decision to sleep in such an uncomfortable position.

“You must have a _wicked_ crick in your neck,” Henry says. He raises his hands and flutters his fingers as though he’s about to perform a magic trick. “Want me to take a look at it?”

Chrom’s lips purse, but after a moment, he leans forward so Henry can get to the back of his neck. Henry lays his hands there, and starts to mentally flip through all the magic he knows for a spell or curse that can achieve what he wants and can be done without gathering ingredients. He opens his mouth and is about to say something when—

“Lovely to see you two getting along so well.”

Henry jerks his hands away from Chrom, more out of surprise than actual fear of what Grima might do to him. Chrom, on the other hand, has a very different reaction: he’s on his feet in an instant, turning to face Grima. He takes a step forward, two, putting himself between Henry and Grima, his face set.

Grima, dressed in a simple linen tunic and trousers, advances into the room to meet him. “Good morning to you, too, Chrom,” he says, “but it’s not you I’ve come for.” He looks past Chrom, meets Henry’s gaze. “I have need of you today, Henry. If you’d be so kind…”

Chrom’s hands wind into fists at his side. He glances back at Henry. Neither of them move.

“I’d rather not be kept waiting.”

Grima’s easy smile does not appreciably change. Nevertheless, Henry has the sensation of something dark and implacable rising up, blotting out the light. He feels as though some great hand has tightened around his chest and begun to squeeze.

Henry sucks in a shallow breath, what feels like the first in hours. He sweeps off the covers and hops out of bed to go to Grima’s side. He tries not to think about what Chrom’s face must look like.

Grima curls an arm around Henry’s shoulders with all the weight of prisoner’s chains. “Good boy,” he says. “Come along. Don’t worry your pretty little head—I will have you back to Chrom in one piece.”

As Grima pulls Henry towards the door, Henry chances a quick look back towards Chrom, and sees just what he thought he would: eyes bright with distress, anguished worry twisting his handsome face. Henry wants to reassure him, insist that pain is easy, most of the time, for him to deal with, or even that he’s pictured this before. That he welcomes this release, at last, because then he’ll know what kind of hurt he can expect from Grima. Context and understanding are, as he’d learned at the school his parents had sent him to, the first steps to acclimatization.

But he can’t find the words.

=

Grima ushers him into the prisons beneath the palace, to a particular cell. There’s a chair and a low wooden table, set out with implements like flatware for a meal; there’s the woman Henry had brought back from the outside, sitting on the stone and chained to the wall. Sometime during the night her clothes had been removed, and now a blindfold keeps her in darkness and a gag obliges her to stay silent. She flinches when she hears their footsteps, and pushes her legs together.

“Go on, sit,” Grima says, paying her no notice at all. “Relax.” He picks up a stone basin from the table, and selects a knife. Its length glimmers in the light of the lantern hanging from the ceiling.

Henry obeys. He’s shivering, and can’t stop; the muffled whimpers and whines the woman is making drown out his thoughts, as loud to him now as the vicious crack and growling roar of lightning and thunder.

Grima gets on his knees in front of Henry, placing the basin and knife to his side. Tenderly, he takes Henry’s right hand, and rolls up the sleeve of Henry’s shirt. “We wouldn’t want to stain Chrom’s clothes, now would we?” he says. “After he was so kind to loan them to you…”

“Chrom’s?” Henry asks. What a strange feeling: that the clothes now draped around his thin shoulders had once lain close against Chrom’s skin. “You’re kidding.”

“Oh, hardly,” Grima chuckles. “He’s sweet on you, Henry. Not hard to see.” He smiles up at Henry. “And so am I, I suppose,” he says, and slices open Henry’s wrist with the knife.

Henry goes rigid, a surprised gasp bursting from his lips. Blood—oh, gods, there’s so much of it, all his own—wells from the cut, and splashes into the basin Grima holds up to catch it. “Hush,” Grima murmurs, when another shocked sound forces its way out of Henry’s mouth, “hush. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

Henry’s breaths, rapid and shallow, rasp through clenched teeth. He wants—he wants to take the knife from Grima’s hand and do the same to him, wants to carve patterns in Grima’s smiling face, wants to—

“Do you remember the thanatophages?” Grima asks, as Henry trembles in front of him, hypnotised by the sight of his own lifeblood dripping away into the stone bowl. He doesn’t seem to care if Henry’s not giving him an answer. “Remember that I told you they were the unintended consequence of an attempt to create life?”

“Yes,” Henry gasps out. Despite it all—the fact he’s undeniably starting to get hard, the fact the pain in his wrist only seems to be getting worse—the talk of the thanatophage has him interested. “What—what about it?”

“That experiment took place long, long ago, under the direction of a man named Forneus,” Grima says. “He was human, of course. Only humans ever seem to try and upset the natural order of things. You are all so foolish.”

The Fell Dragon’s eyes are staring into a world Henry himself can’t see. He’s lost in memories.

“He succeeded, eventually,” Grima says. “He created a new form of life. He obtained the blood of a divine dragon, shed from her during menarche, and mixed it with his own fluids. His seed. His blood. This concoction, this melding of human and divine dragon…” Grima pauses, and then he looks up at Henry with a smile. “I’ve sure you’ve guessed it by now. It birthed me.”

His lips thin. “Forneus tried to kill me later, of course, terrified by what I was becoming. You humans. You are so quick to seek divine assistance, to beg for divine favour, yet at the same time so quick to shun your benefactors once you have what you desire.”

Grima puts the basin aside, now half-filled with Henry’s blood, and presses his lips to the wound on Henry’s wrist; the injury begins to heal, Grima’s magic welding Henry’s skin back together again. “I have lived for so long, Henry. I spent the first few millennia of my life sealed underground, and then spent millennia more in a cursed state of unlife after some boy from across the sea murdered me in the depths of my prison. Now, though, I have a body. Now, I...”

This is it: the root of the Fell Dragon’s madness. Because madness it is, despite the façade of arrogance that Grima conceals it with. A thousand lifetimes of utter isolation; a thousand lifetimes defined by the agony of betrayal.

Grima kisses the palm of Henry’s hand; he kisses the tips of his fingers, too, one by one. “But this vessel won’t last forever, Henry,” he says. “So, you see what must be done.”

Oh, Henry does. Grima had laid it out for him so helpfully.

The Fell Dragon pushes forward, nosing between Henry’s legs, and rests his cheek on Henry’s inner thigh. Henry, dizzy from blood loss, sucks in a sharp breath, and the room swims and sways before his eyes; he can’t seem to rouse the strength to do anything but sit there, breathing hard, as Grima does what he wants.

Grima tugs down Henry’s trousers, and then his smallclothes, and Henry’s hard as a stone, his cock twitching as it’s exposed to the cold air. Grima opens his mouth, holding Henry steady with a hand laid flat on one of his legs, and all Henry sees is sharp, sharp teeth—

But Grima is careful. The damp heat of his mouth draws a moan from Henry’s lips, and the hand he cups Henry’s balls with wins Grima another. There’s nothing romantic about what Grima’s doing: his only goal is to make Henry come, and he does what he needs to in order to make that happen.

Grima pauses to wet his lips and work more saliva into his mouth, and then he wraps his lips around Henry’s cock again. He works up to a steady rhythm that makes Henry arch forward with a cry, his hands tangling in Grima’s hair. “Oh,” he moans, “oh, gods, please—”

He comes in short order; Grima takes every drop of it into his mouth, comes close to choking on it, even. Then he bends over the basin and parts his lips—semen and blood swirl together, the foundation of a new life. The sight is almost too much for Henry.

“Now,” Grima says, licking his lips, swallowing down the last of it with a smile, “now…” He picks up the knife and offers it to Henry, hilt first. “Would you do the honours?” he asks, and offers Henry his own wrist.

And Henry, he—he doesn’t know what happened, exactly, but the knife jumps forward, held by a hand that doesn’t feel like his own, and it draws a red line across Grima’s cheek from the corner of his mouth to his ear. Like he told Chrom, Grima makes everything worse: there’s a frenetic energy coursing under his skin now, pushing him to hurt to torture to spill blood to make Grima _scream_ —

Grima’s laughing. He looks utterly charmed.

“Oh, Henry,” he says, tilting his head so his blood sloshes out over his cheek and into the basin, “oh, _Henry_...”

He places the basin on the table, and drags a hand across his cheek, the wound there vanishing as he does so. Then, he reaches out, taking fistfuls of Henry’s shirt, and tugs him off the chair. He throws Henry onto the floor, and Henry’s head bounces off the stone; Henry lolls dazedly on his back for a handful of seconds, muddled by the impact, before trying to rise.

Grima pins him to the ground with hands to his shoulders. He drapes himself over Henry’s body to nuzzle Henry’s neck, and still, he’s laughing. “I was going to leave you for Chrom first,” Grima says, his eyes darkened with desire, “but not now. Oh, not now.” He kisses Henry’s chin, and then playfully nips at the tip of his nose. “You’re wonderful, Henry.”

The kiss that Henry had given Chrom the night before could be _compared_ to an assault, but what Grima does to him now _is_ one. He gorges himself on Henry’s pain and his own, and there is none of the give-and-take Henry imagined. What Grima wants, he takes; and what Henry wants matters not at all.

When Henry desperately tears into Grima’s chest with his nails, Grima’s face is blissful; when he enters Henry without any preparation at all, something that’s agony for Henry but undoubtedly painful for Grima, too, the noise Grima makes is more like an expression of satisfaction than of hurt.

He leaves Henry torn and bleeding on the floor, rubbed raw in a dozen places. Henry can barely move: his hips ache, his cheek is scored down almost to the bone from where Grima had pushed it against the stone floor, and he can barely breathe for the pain of the wounds Grima had given him. His voice is hoarse, too, from when he screamed as Grima probed Henry’s ass with his fingers after using him, searching out his own blood and sperm to add to the concoction to create a new fell vessel.

Well, this is what he wanted, isn’t it? To be treated like Chrom. He forgets that fantasy is nothing like reality.

The last thing he sees before he falls unconscious is Grima, thighs slick with his and Henry’s fluids, limping over to the woman, another knife held loosely in his hand. (After Grima had come inside of Henry, Grima coaxed Henry’s cock into wakefulness and rode him until he bled.)

“Now then, my dear,” Grima says, and his voice seems as though it’s coming to Henry from far, far away, “your time has come.”

Gratefully, Henry passes out.

=

When he awakens, it is not in a bed. No, Henry is still in the prison; he still lies on the cold stone where Grima had abandoned him. He lifts his head with no small amount of effort, and—

And there’s the woman, still chained to the wall, still blindfolded, still gagged. Split open from chest to groin. Grima had left much of her in its place, but what he’d taken—well, it had been the womb, of course. The dragon wants a child, and seeks to birth it in the same fashion his creator had.

The son, repeating the sins of the father. The dragon, all alone. Grima, obsessed with pain, with sex, with _sensation_ , the more extreme the better. Insatiable.

Henry, pared down to his least at that moment, feels nothing but exhausted empathy. Like he’d admitted to Chrom, he hurts and kills to fill a need—and, he knows now, so does Grima. Grima had been for thousands and thousands of years denied a body and the primordial feeling of _being_ —so now, gifted with a human vessel, he has become wholly and truly addicted to living. To the highs of ecstasy and the lows of agony. To the feeling of holding a sentient creature’s life in his hands. He is desperate for something, anything, to tell him he’s still alive.

Or maybe that’s just nonsense dreamt up by Henry’s pain-addled mind. He has no idea.

The slap of bare feet on stone is followed by Grima’s voice. “Ah, you’re awake. Good.”

The dragon is naked still, with only Robin’s cloak slung loosely over his shoulders. On his bare chest, there are new scars—the wounds Henry had left when he had tried in vain to fight Grima off, immortalized in keloid, sitting side by side with what Chrom had done.

Grima is carrying a plate of food: hunks of bread, slices of cheese, cut and cored apples, and a bunch of grapes. He pauses inside the door, rips off a chunk of bread with teeth still stained from Henry’s blood, and then strolls forward to lay the plate down next to Henry’s face.

“How are you feeling, Henry?” Grima asks.

“Never better.” For a moment he can’t quite believe the voice coming from his mouth is his own, as rough and worn down as it is. “Was just in the middle of a nice nap.”

“You were indeed out like a light.”

Henry grins. “I slept like the dead.”

Grima hums a laugh, husky and soft. “Fortunately enough, not literally like the dead.” The dragon drops onto the floor beside Henry, wincing as he does so, and then leans over to run a single finger down the centre of Henry’s chest, all the way to his stomach. He lets his hand settle there, palm down. “Do you feel well enough to eat?”

Henry tries to rise, tries to get out from under the hand holding him down, but the effort triggers a litany of protests from all parts of his body, which in turn birth a pained gasp that claws its way out from between his teeth. Grima’s face is a parody of sympathy as he gathers Henry into his arms and pulls him close, and he hushes Henry as though Henry were a recalcitrant child when Henry cries out from being dragged along the stone.

“Oh, come here, Henry. You must be in so much pain—let me help you.”

Henry ends up between Grima’s outstretched legs, his back propped against the dragon’s chest. Grima rests his chin on Henry’s shoulder, his hair brushing Henry’s cheek, and puts his arms around his middle. “This won’t take long at all,” Grima says. “Hold still.”

The last time Grima had healed him, bringing him back from the edge of death, it had been nothing like the healing done by staves or vulneraries or elixirs—a gentle cajoling, a gentle whisper on the skin. No, it had been a domineering power, wholly Grima’s, that had compelled his body to do the impossible: repair a fatal wound in a mere handful of minutes, and regrow organs that were never meant to be lost in the first place. Forcing his body to do what it was not built to do had resulted in only torment.

This time is not much different. The wounds are smaller and nothing that should be on the inside is on the outside, but it still puts an ache into him that worms down to his bones. No doubt Grima feels the same pain when he heals himself, and no doubt he gets off on it like he gets off on everything else.

There is one significant difference, though: this time, Grima lets him keep the scars.

When the healing is done and Grima is sure Henry can sit on his own, he gets up and moves over to the table, where the stone basin sits. He takes the basin up in both hands, and smiles.

“Why’d you tell me to bring her back alive?” Henry asks abruptly.

“Hmm?” 

“Her,” Henry says, indicating the dead woman with a jerk of the head. “If you were just going to kill her…” 

_Monster. Inhuman creature. Monster._

“It would have saved me a lot of hassle if _I_ could’ve just killed her, that’s for sure.”

“Well,” Grima says, “fresh ingredients are always better when doing magic that requires them.” He raises an eyebrow in Henry’s direction. “You specialise in curses and hexes and the like, Henry, so you no doubt know that better than I.”

He sweeps back over to Henry, gets down on his haunches next to him, and shows him the contents of the basin. “But here—look, Henry. Your fell blood, my fell blood. The seed of a human being, taken from a man; the seed of a human being, taken from a woman. And my essence, tying it all together. _Look_ , Henry—the miracle of life.”

Henry, as always, looks. The fluids in the basin have, no doubt at the urging of Grima’s magic, congealed into a viscous substance, transparent as glass, that swaddles a tiny gobbet of cells barely visible to the naked eye. Like an amniotic sac.

“But this life will die, unless it is given shelter. Somewhere warm and safe, where it can grow and develop. Tell me, Henry”—Grima kisses his cheek—“where do you think that might be?”

Oh. _Oh._

“Me,” Henry breathes. “You’re going to put it in me, aren’t you?” He grins; he laughs so hard he can hardly breathe. “This is why you wanted me here, isn’t it? Is it because I have your fell blood in me? Is that why? Oh, gods, it’s so _obvious_ now.”

“Smart boy,” Grima says. “Though it is true it would have been more convenient to have had here Tharja instead of you, the Risen are”—Grima permits himself a little laugh—“not the best at taking prisoners.”

Grima pats Henry’s cheek. “You understand why I could not use the woman you brought back for me to cocoon my future vessel. I couldn’t risk her Ylissean heritage tainting the effort in any way.”

“Yes, yes, of course! Of course,” Henry says, fighting down the laughter threatening to spill from his mouth again. At least it’ll be an interesting way to go, he tells himself: torn open by a child he was never meant to carry. Or maybe Grima won’t let him die at all—maybe he’ll keep Henry alive during the birth, just for the hell of it. “I’m perfect for you. Plegian and everything. A nest, lined with fell blood, to hatch an egg...”

“Indeed. You must be honoured, Henry, because you—you will help me create new life.”

_Do not be afraid, Henry, for you have found favour with God._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just for the record, I have _not_ embellished Grima's backstory all that much here. [See here; the section entitled "The Creation" may be helpful.](https://kantopia.wordpress.com/2018/04/07/fe-sov-valentia-accordion-secrets-of-thabes-labyrinth-translated/) I did add some details (e.g. menarche) to flesh it out a little, but otherwise I left it alone.
> 
> Also, the last line is a reference to the set of Bible verses where the angel informs Mary she's about to be impregnated by God. Everyone loves blasphemy, right?


	4. Théotokos

Grima throws an arm around Chrom’s neck and tells him what Henry is destined for; and Chrom inhales sharply and shuts his eyes, all emotion on his face crumbling into ash. “How can you look so sad when this household will soon be blessed with child, my precious Exalt?” Grima asks, pushing up the corner of Chrom’s lips with a slim finger. “Go on, smile. This ought to be a time of celebration.”

Chrom does not oblige him. Instead, he opens his eyes to give Henry a look that is so full of squirming guilt and aching pain that it gives even Henry pause.

And it makes Henry realise something essential. He has another role here, here at the centre of Grima’s dead empire, apart from his carrying the child of a god. Stuck cheek to cheek with Chrom, night in and night out, there is no way the Exalt, whose heart had always been large and full, could _not_ start caring for him, as a friend, of sorts, or even something more. Chrom stays by Grima because Grima is Robin, and Robin is a link to the happy life Chrom once led; so it is inevitable, then, that Chrom would come to cherish Henry, too. So he, Henry, becomes like Lissa, like Frederick, like Maribelle, like Lucina. An instrument of torture.

Had Chrom been able to see that, too? And yet he still reached out, knowing that Grima would use his affections against him. It’s stupid, Henry thinks, but very like the Chrom that Robin had described to Henry a lifetime ago.

Grima drags Chrom into a deep, bloody kiss, and then slips away into the dim hallway beyond Henry’s room, humming to himself. Henry and Chrom stay still, very still, eyes locked, until they’re sure Grima is truly gone.

Then Chrom staggers forward to sweep Henry into a hug. His chin presses against the crown of Henry’s head as Chrom clings to him. It feels like an apology.

Henry returns the hug as best he can. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay! Really. I’m kind of looking forward to it. You know what I mean?”

Chrom snorts disbelievingly. It doesn’t have that much weight without a voice behind it, and sounds more like a sniffle than anything else.

“Come on,” Henry says after a few moments, his smile drooping a little. It’s harder than he expected to keep his voice cheerful. “Don’t be such a downer. It really is okay. Besides—he’s _Grima_. I mean, what could you have done?”

Chrom shudders, and Henry finds himself patting a quaking, broad back with an open hand.

“Aw, don’t cry,” he says. “We’re not kids anymore. Besides, I said that it’s fine, didn’t I? Just think about it—we’ll be around for the birth of the child of god. Well, maybe _I_ won’t be, but…”

The arms around him tighten. And this time, Henry can’t find anything else to say.

=

Grima’s assault is a beginning: Henry becomes, so easily, so naturally, a part of whatever it is that Grima and Chrom share. Or maybe he’s always been a part of it, and he’s never noticed, or never understood what exactly that meant until this point. But nevertheless—he joins their meals now, he is allowed to hurt Grima like Chrom does, he is allowed to be hurt by Grima like Chrom is. Like a dog pissing on his territory, Grima marks him; the scars Henry is given reproduce scratches and bite marks, and delineate a nipple that used to be whole until Grima ripped it off with his teeth.

One night, as Grima, who’d taken their cocks up his ass one after the other and then at the same time, dozes curled up and spent nearby on the bed, Henry maps out the scars on Chrom’s chest with his fingers. “We match now,” he tells Chrom—in a low voice, of course, because their god is sleeping.

Chrom nods unhappily. He takes Henry’s hand, and laces their fingers together, squeezing tightly.

“You’re going to have to stop looking so guilty one of these days,” Henry tells him, reaching out to fit his hand against Chrom’s cheek. “I wasn’t even mad at you in the first place—as crazy as that sounds.”

Chrom rolls his eyes.

“If you _want_ to torture yourself over this, that’s your prerogative, I guess,” Henry says. “But it’s true. Cross my heart and hope to die—no, wait. _That’s_ not right. Cross my heart and hope to be...non-fatally injured? Mildly incapacitated?” He giggles softly.

It has become easier to read Chrom’s expressions recently, especially when the feeling behind them is blindingly obvious. Here, it’s plain as day: _Really, Henry?_

Henry touches a particular scar on Chrom’s stomach. It’s a rough, jagged patch, the oldest scar there, that indicates the place where Grima had stabbed him with magic the day Robin had been overwhelmed, drowned in the deep, dark ocean that was the mind of an ancient dragon.

“Grima told me about what he did to you, y’know. So,” he says, as Chrom’s eyes widen. “So I don’t hold it against you at all. And, by the way, _everyone_ dies one day. I just might be doing it sooner than usual. It’s really not that bad.”

There’s a wetness in Chrom’s eyes as he inclines his head to kiss Henry’s forehead. But though there’s sadness in Chrom’s face, Henry sees relief there, too.

Chrom pulls away from him, then, releasing his hand after a moment of hesitation and a wordless apology. Henry, stretched out on his side, drops his head on a pillow, and with vision partly obscured by a hill of cotton and silk, watches Chrom turn to Grima.

He almost feels like he shouldn’t be watching this: Chrom, tenderly pushing Grima’s hair out of his face, brushing his knuckles against the line of Grima’s cheekbone, looking at him with a longing that disquiets even Henry. But considering he was only a quarter of an hour before this pinned between the two of them, with Chrom’s lips tracing a line of hot kisses up the curve of his back and with his cock buried in Grima’s ass, he decides he can share in this intimacy, if only vicariously.

This is the only way Chrom can see Robin again—when Grima sleeps. Chrom can pretend it’s Robin’s hair that he’s touching; he can pretend it’s Robin’s cheek he’s kissing. This is why Chrom could never bring himself to harm Grima, even now, even after Grima has murdered almost everyone he ever cared about. Because love is a terrible, terrible thing.

Chrom lets the palm of his hand linger on Grima’s cheek for a moment longer, and then he relaxes onto his back. He gestures for Henry to come closer, and Henry does. He presses his face against Chrom’s skin; they’re both sticky with dried sweat and come, and it’s a hot, hot night, but Henry finds he doesn’t care.

He falls asleep tucked against Chrom’s side. Safe.

Safe for now, at least.

=

There are no symptoms that accompany the growth of the child (so he only knows the child is still growing when Grima lays his hands on Henry’s stomach and tells him how well it’s progressing). Henry does not wake nauseated in the mornings, he does not crave different foods, he does not himself grow along with it. For all intents and purposes, it is as if Grima had done nothing to him at all.

Most of the time.

Because sometimes, something shifts within him, deep within him, within his soul, and the pain that comes with it obliterates all until the child nestled within him stills once more. Excruciating, torturous, agonising, unendurable—none of those words fully encompass the pain he suffers when the child stirs. It doesn’t even seem fitting to call it pain, really, because his nerves, part of his physical self, feel nothing; it is a disturbance to the most essential part of him. It is the child violating his very being without even understanding what it’s doing.

Sometimes, he hears a baby crying in the distance. He asks Chrom about it, and all Chrom does is raise a confused eyebrow, so Henry changes the subject.

Other times, he has thoughts that are not his own. They’re simple and innocent. Wonderings about the rainbow of light cast on the windowpane, about the beetle trundling peacefully along a hallway carpet. They give him goosebumps and send a shiver rattling up his spine (because as drawn as he is to the macabre, having some _thing_ think for you is, to put it lightly, unsettling); and when he tries to follow the thread of these childish musings back to their origin, he finds the thread fray and unravel into nothingness even as he grasps at it. 

The child’s restlessness leads him to stick by Chrom. When you’re knocked unconscious every so often by the most profound _agony_ you have ever experienced, it’s nice to have someone who can care for you, make you comfortable, and ensure you don’t break anything. And Chrom is attentive, he is conscientious, and even after Henry scratches him across the face during his pain-fuelled seizures, Chrom still watches over him.

Every day starts to feel the same (though without any civilisation left to keep careful track of the date and time, every day _is_ the same, from a certain point of view). Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Being with Chrom. The empty hours, shambling by like the Risen that occupy the palace. The sweat beading on his forehead and the back of his pale neck. Cutting apart Risen out of boredom. Sleeping sprawled out between Chrom and Grima.

 _Papa?_

A week passes, then two, then three. The days drip by so slowly that it feels like two months instead, and it is so humid and so warm—a constant, unrelenting heat, different from the Plegian desert, where temperatures rise high during the day and plunge low during the night—that even Grima seems affected. He sleeps more, staying in the bed the three of them share until noon, one o’clock, two o’clock in the afternoon; he demands less of them, is gentler, as hard as that is to believe.

Chrom gives Henry a wooden training sword one day when the heat has, for the moment, relented. Grey-black clouds hang low over their heads, presaging a storm, and a cool breeze winds its way across the palace grounds, granting much-needed relief from the oppressive summer weather.

The sword Chrom gives him is one that the prince probably carved himself, Naga bless him, and Henry takes it, weighing it in his hand. “I _did_ train with Frederick,” he says, giving Chrom a lopsided smile. “I might be better than you think.”

Chrom lifts his eyebrows—a challenge, which Henry accepts willingly. He has tired of sitting around, yes, but this is like the time Chrom had had him help make that meal, the first time he met Chrom in the kitchen.

Chrom proceeds to disarm Henry five times in a row. The sixth time, Henry gets lucky (he knows it’s luck, because despite Chrom’s casual demeanour he is a _dangerously_ competent swordsman) and lands a blow on Chrom’s knuckles; Chrom, to his credit, keeps hold of the sword, but the strike startles him, and Henry seizes the opportunity to use the disarming trick Frederick taught him.

“I knew I’d get you eventually,” Henry says, smirking, as Chrom’s sword hits the grass. “Maybe it’s time to quit while I’m ahead—”

He’s not able to finish, because Chrom lunges, intent on taking him to the ground. They fall together in a tangle of limbs, Henry underneath Chrom, and somewhere along the way, Henry misplaces his sword. As he’s recovering, Chrom pins his hands above his head, and he, the Exalt, the last of the Ylissean royalty, quirks an eyebrow with a smug smile, as if to say _What were you saying about winning?_

“ _That’s_ not playing fair,” Henry says.

The meaning of Chrom’s expression and his exaggerated shrug couldn’t be clearer. _And?_

Henry laughs, really and truly, and the sound surprises even himself, as happy and sincere as it is. “Well, fine. You win, Chrom. Again.”

Chrom looks satisfied, but after a moment, his expression changes subtly, becoming fonder, more tempered by affection. He dips his head and he kisses Henry, coaxing his lips open so he can sweep his tongue into his mouth—they’ve come a long, long way from that night where Henry came so, so close to falling apart.

“Was your training just an excuse to put us in this oh-so-compromising situation?” Henry asks, after Chrom pulls back. A sly smile spreads across his face. “You devil, Chrom.”

Chrom flushes and shakes his head vigorously, but he stiffens—in more ways than one—when Henry pushes up a leg to grind it against Chrom’s groin.

“I don’t mind, you know,” Henry tells him. “I welcome it, actually.”

They end up frotting in the grass, making do with their saliva and a little determination. Chrom comes first with a shuddering outrush of breath and his face buried in the hollow of Henry’s neck, and after lifting his head to give Henry an apologetic look, he wraps Henry’s cock in his hand (large and callused and warm), and strokes him until Henry, too, is spent.

Henry’s barely caught his breath when the skies above them open up. As the rain turns the ground around them to mud, Chrom hurriedly cleans the two of them the best he can with their shirts, then gathers Henry into his arms and scurries back into the dimness of the palace. Henry laughs, again, as he runs a hand through Chrom’s wet hair.

_Papa, are you there?_

=

Eighty days after Grima placed his child within Henry, on a day when rain from a summer storm is nearly horizontal and the wind rattles the windows of the palace like a burglar trying to gain entry, something changes. Henry wakes to pain—a mere backdrop at first, a subtle ache within him, but it only gets worse from there.

The pain is different from what he normally feels when the child stirs. It’s more physical, more grounded in reality than before, and it steadily worsens as the hours pass until he can no longer even stand. He is confined to the bed in their room, where he lies, struggling to cling to consciousness, listening to the muted fury of the storm outside.

Chrom stays by his side, caring for him as best as he knows how. He dabs the sweat from Henry’s face and the back of his neck with a cool cloth, and fetches him water and bland foods when Henry feels well enough to eat or drink, but mostly he sits in a chair by the bed and holds Henry’s hand. His face is the picture of someone intimately familiar with powerlessness.

Henry tries to reassure him. “It’ll pass,” he gasps out. “It hasn’t even been three months. It’s way too soon for a kid. Not that I have any personal experience with it, but...”

Of course, that’s ridiculous, because this isn’t a normal child. Neither of them know— _can_ know—what this child’s birth will entail. None of the usual human metrics apply.

Grima arrives in the afternoon. He kisses Chrom’s cheek, surprisingly tender, and then comes to Henry. He hikes up Henry’s shirt and lays his hands on Henry’s smooth stomach. He closes his eyes.

“You won’t have to wait much longer,” Grima says, after a moment. “It will be soon, sweet Henry. I’d tell you that I hope you’re ready, but you won’t be.” He chuckles, and his eyes come open again. “Don’t worry, though. No matter what happens, I won’t let you die.”

_Papa. I’m ready._

Henry screws a smile onto his face. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” he says.

“You shouldn’t.”

And Grima, smirking—

Grima, he—

Something moves inside of Henry, and it’s not like before. Oh, it’s not like before at all; this is not a metaphysical intrusion on his being, but something very, very physical. It is something moving and twisting inside his stomach, burrowing its way out of the abstract realm in which it had grown and into the real world.

He probably screams—he’s not sure, because the pain he’s feeling interferes with everything down to his thoughts. The world hits his eyes in agonising fragments: flashes of Chrom’s wide, horrified eyes, flashes of Grima’s narrow smirk. He’s rolled onto his side, and he curls in on himself, winding his arms over a belly that distends as the child squirms its way into existence.

Henry writhes on the bed, tossing his head back with another whimpering cry as the child pushes against his guts. He can’t even breathe; his mouth gapes open, and his eyes flicker under half-closed eyelids.

Grima places a hand on his forehead. “Shh,”he says. “It’s all right.”

And as the child finally breaks through the barrier between reality and unreality, as it finally carves out a place for itself within Henry’s body, the world twists around him. For a blinding moment, he sees to the essence of things, if they were not reduced and constrained by the laws of the physical world around him.

Chrom, carrier of Naga’s blood, is beautiful: light sloughs from glimmering skin, and stars gather at his brow like a handful of pearls. He shines.

Grima is nothing like Chrom. His face is a wedge of teeming shadow, in whose depths glow six crimson eyes. Robin’s limbs dissolve into the same grasping darkness at their ends, and his back is opened like a cracked egg; wings, feathers oily with nameless fluids, drool out of him to trail on the floor. And when he reaches for Henry, the shadows grasp for Henry as he does, winding themselves around him, burning cold.

Henry screams again, and Grima covers his mouth with one hand. “Hush,” the dragon says, his voice the expiration of the dead and dying. 

“I will take care of everything.”

=

_Papa, I’m here._

=

Henry’s sleeping now, and the tranquillity of it is a stark contrast to the horror that had taken place earlier in the day. After Grima had cut him open and wrested the child from his insides, a squalling baby covered in blood, Grima had made Henry whole again, and Henry’s screams still ring in Chrom’s ears.

“You didn’t have to stay for the birth, you know,” Grima says, from where he stands by the window. The baby sits in the crook of his arm, its tiny fists gripping the fabric of Robin’s cloak, quiet for the time being. “You could have left.”

He angles his gaze back towards Chrom, who’s sitting in the chair at Henry’s bedside, and Chrom shakes his head.

Grima rolls his eyes. “Did you feel obligated to bear witness to his suffering, is that it? A self-imposed punishment?”

Chrom stretches out a hand to smooth Henry’s hair. Helplessness is fertile ground, and the feeling of profound despair that grows from it, that binds his limbs and chokes the air from him with its constricting vines, is an old friend. He has no voice to protect himself from Grima’s words, and had been unable to protect his sister, Frederick, Maribelle, the Shepherds, and worst of all, his husband and child. 

And now Grima has done the same thing again, here, with Henry. He allowed the two of them to grow close before inflicting upon Henry a torture far, far beyond anything Chrom could have imagined. Chrom had again strapped himself to a breaking wheel and handed Grima the hammer—because he couldn't have done otherwise. He could not bring himself to let Henry alone, because 'each other' was all they had.

Grima has moved to stand before him, and he shows Chrom the baby. Chrom looks down, into the baby’s eyes, and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, because the baby has the slitted eyes of dragonkind, and on the back of its right hand is Grima’s symbol, the six staring eyes.

“It’s a girl,” Grima says softly. “What a coincidence, hmm? What should we call her, do you think?” He smiles viciously. “Lucina, perhaps?”

Grima laughs as Chrom sucks in a trembling breath, trying not to cry at the memory of Lucina’s death. The dragon runs a hand over the baby’s head, and smiles, amused, when she grabs his little finger with her small hand and holds fast.

“How does Morgan sound?” Grima asks. “I think it’s a fine name, don’t you, Chrom?”

Chrom shrugs.

“Morgan, then,” Grima says. “Morgan, you will grow strong. And someday, you will have the honour of being my vessel. How does that strike you?” 

The baby gurgles, clearly flattered by the attention of the person she sees as her father. She extends an arm to push her hand against Grima’s cheek, making another delighted sound.

“I thought you might like that idea,” Grima says. “Here, why don’t you say hello to another of your parents, little princess? Go on, Chrom. Take her.”

(“Go on, Chrom. Take Lucina. It’s all right, you’re not going to hurt her! I know you won’t.”)

He presses Morgan into Chrom’s unwilling arms. Chrom cradles her against his chest and looks into those edge-of-night violet eyes, feeling the tiny scales growing from her back dig into his arm. She smiles that wide, innocent smile babies have, and Chrom’s throat clenches tight.

Grima really has truly won. Chrom has at last been given the chance to do something to interfere with Grima’s plans—he could take this child and break her neck (it wouldn’t take much effort, he’s sure of it) or he could turn and smash her head open against the doorframe or he could wait until Grima is ready to take her as his vessel and kill her then, after she’s learned to love and trust him as a father—but it would make him no better than Grima himself. Chrom, again, cannot do what needs to be done.

He slumps over in his chair, pressing a hand to his mouth, eyes stinging with tears. Grima drapes himself against Chrom’s back and his arms wind around Chrom’s neck like a noose.

“Oh, Chrom,” he says, breath hot against Chrom’s ear. “Don’t cry. You have so much—a daughter, a husband, a lover. You can find happiness here, can’t you?

“All you have to do is reach for it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.
> 
> This fic was inspired by late-night musings on both the following quote Robin/Grima has in The Future Past 3 (and that is reprised in a shorter form in Heroes): "...I have always been the fell dragon... ...since the day I was born... ...I wish that I were human! That I could have lived a normal life with you! ...But I'm not, and I can't..." and on Grima's canonical backstory, which is honestly _really shitty_ if you really think about it.
> 
> Why Henry? Two reasons. I was re-reading his support conversations with Cherche recently, and noticed that in their S-support he thinks that she wants to include Chrom in their marriage, and is pretty much fine with that. I also thought he'd handle living through the end of the world pretty well in comparison to all the other Shepherds, given his...unique personality.
> 
> Finally, the eighty days it took for the child to develop and then be born is a reference to Grima's backstory and how quickly _he_ grew.


End file.
